One year and nearly 3 million visitors later, NASA's retired space shuttle Endeavour is the focus of a celebration at its Los Angeles museum home.

The California Science Center is commemorating the first anniversary of Endeavour's delivery to its Samuel Oschin Pavilion with a celebration to thank everyone who joined in supporting the shuttle's historic journey. "Endeavour Fest" begins on Friday (Oct. 11) and runs through Sunday with special exhibits and astronaut guest speakers scheduled.

And a preview of things to come...

"We're preparing, a year from now, to put the Spacehab in the payload bay," Phillips told collectSPACE. "We have to figure out how we're going to move the attach hardware in the payload bay to where it needs to be. We have had the crew hatch open [Oct. 10] and have gone from there through the middeck into the payload bay to get an idea as to what we need."

The video begins with the stacking of the shuttle atop the 747 transporter at the Kennedy Space Station in Florida and the later unstacking at Los Angeles Airport, then follows the earthbound orbiter on the slow crawl along the avenues, side streets and residential roads of L.A. The 6-and-a-half minutes of footage are just a tiny fragment of what was supposed to be a 36-hr. trip and turned out to take four days — and from the look of the video, it’s a wonder it didn’t take much longer. Endeavour crept along in a motorcade attended not just by police and news crews, but by a swarm of tree-wranglers and cherry-pickers, who came along to prune back or pull aside overhanging branches, power lines and suspended signs.

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Andrews and his team left none of this unrecorded. Their 12 cameras captured about 500 hours — or six terabytes — of data over the course of the four days, nearly all of which they spent on the flat-bed crawler with the shuttle, getting about four hours’ sleep out of every 24. “We were up almost constantly,” says Andrews. “It was a total blur.”